Review: Four Against Darkness

 

A little while ago I bought Four Against Darkness, which is a solo (solitaire) RPG book, a bit like Dungeons & Dragons in a much lighter way. Although for a single player, there are four members of the party made of various classes chosen by said player (elf, dwarf, halfling, wizard, warrior, etc). NB this can also be played as a light RPG with a party of players.

To play you need the book itself, a pair of d6 (six-sided dice), and some graph paper.

The game procedurally generates dungeons by rolling dice, with the contents of rooms generated the same way. These contents can be foes (large or small), unusual features, or traps. The dungeon is ‘won’ by defeating the final boss (which can appear in any room or corridor) and getting out alive (retracing steps can mean encountering wandering monsters).

Necessarily, characters and combat are way more basic than tabletop RPGs. Most of this is down to dice rolling, although player choice is present in some important ways, such as choosing when your wizard or elf casts spells (which are powerful but you only get a few for a level 1 wizard and one for a level 1 elf). Likewise, you can choose to search an empty room (which can lead to finding useful stuff or being attacked). When to use healing powers/potions/bandages can also be important.

Players can also choose to not immediately attack foes, who may flee or ask for a bribe.

It’ll be slower than this the first time and the number of bosses can vary (the fewest I encountered was one, the most was five), but a game might last around 45 minutes from start to finish. Overall, I like this book and the system a lot. Once you get to grips with the rules things flow pretty smoothly and quirks add a little to the characters/party (my rogue, Rapsnax, has rolled a 1 on every single trap he’s ever tried to disarm, failing every time).

There are a lot of supplementary books, offering specific adventures/dungeons, new classes, and expanding the levels for characters. But I would strongly advocate just buying the first book (around £10) and seeing if it’s to your liking before considering buying some of the many extra books.

Incidentally, RPG book fans should be aware that Lone Wolf is getting a full re-release, with the first few out already. If you’ve got a gap in your collection now (or very soon) is a good time to fill it.

Thaddeus

Review: Flight From The Dark (Lone Wolf book 1), by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk

Disclaimer: I played these books as a child, so my reviews will likely be laced with nostalgia.

Flight From The Dark is the first of dozens of gamebooks that Joe Dever (initially with Gary Chalk, later solo) wrote. For those unaware, a gamebook is approximately halfway between a videogame or tabletop RPG and a book. The reader/player makes decisions to determine how they try and solve problems, win fights, and so on. It’s eminently possible to end up dead and have to restart.

Flight From The Dark is a thinnish volume but has 350 sections. The premise is simple: you are Lone Wolf, a lowly member of the Order of the Kai, hero-warriors who protect the good from the evil of the nearby Darklords. Unfortunately, you’re a slacker and have to miss a celebratory feast to go gather firewood as punishment. This saves your life as the Darklords roll up and kill everyone who attends, wiping out the entire order.

Except for you.

You must flee to Holmgard, the capital, to warn and help the king, evading or fighting the Drakkarim, giaks, kraan, and other monstrous servants of the Darklords.

Character creation is mostly about picking the Kai disciplines you have, everything from healing to animal kinship, psychic defence (or attack) to hunting. Choosing wisely is critical, and getting lucky when you ‘roll’ (you could use a d10 but there’s also a sort of random number generator by way of a grid of numbers at the back, from which you can pick blindly) for combat skill and endurance.

Smart choices also matter. Being heroic sounds good, but I only survived one entirely voluntary encounter by fluking a couple of great combat results. By rights I should’ve been killed. At other times my cunning strategy helped me evade fights that would’ve occurred, if I didn’t have the right skills.

It’s a fun introduction to Lone Wolf, Magnamund (the wider LW world), and gamebooks, and only takes an hour or two after you’ve created your own Lone Wolf.

I discovered shortly after writing the above review that Joe Dever died a few years ago. RIP. His Lone Wolf books were (along with books written by Bernard Cornwell) what I read the most in my early teens. Sad to hear of his passing.

For those interested, there are plenty of second hand paperbacks floating around, and I know he gave his blessing for Project Aon, a website which enables you to play the books for free. There’s also (though I’m unsure of availability) some hardback reprints from a decade or so ago, if you prefer physical books.

Thaddeus

Gamebooks

I hadn’t planned on writing this post, but a cunning new gamebook (available for free) by a splendid, if silly, fellow I know has spurred me to it. It’s available in pdf form here, though as it’s a largeish file (60 odd megabytes) you might prefer to right click and save that way.

http://www.unboundbook.org/FightingFantazine/FF6.pdf

The 200 section adventure included above is no walk in the park. In my first attempt (admittedly with rolls that stunk like a skunk) I got killed in my second section. My second attempt was better, I got quite a long way in only to find myself defeated by the death traps.

When I was younger I played a number of gamebooks. For the uninitiated, the genre (aka ‘choose your own adventure’) involves making decisions as you read, and then turning to a given numbered section of the book. Complexity can vary from doing only that to having a full-fledged character with numerous attributes and skills and participating in combat.

Ah, the joy of Lemmings. Not only did they have staggering success with computer games, there were also a few gamebooks about the green-haired lunatics. Given the nature of the lemmings (they each specialised in a given skill/ability) they were strangely well-adapted to gamebooks. Sonic the Hedgehog had some too, and likewise Asterix.

However, my favourites were easily the Lone Wolf books by Joe Dever. Crammed with fantasy staples such as implacable Darklord enemies, being the sole survivor of a massacre and so forth, the adventures took place in a wide range of locations, even in the hellish realm of Naar, god of chaos, itself. It was an advantage to have played previous books (you could keep certain especially good items and get extra skills) but not necessary to succeed in any given adventure. I must still have about a score of them.

Unlike an ordinary book, you can get killed whilst reading. If this happens, you have to start again from the beginning. Deaths can occur in combat, or sometimes from stupid choices. Likewise, there will almost always be certain sections that must be read (bottlenecks, if you like), the start and the end being most obvious (although alternate endings can be included).

Of course, with RPG games becoming more popular, it could be difficult for a concept such as the gamebook to survive. However, when flitting through Amazon (almost a reflex reaction) I saw that there was a new book by Michael J. Ward out, entitled DestinyQuest: The Legion of Shadow. It’s a gamebook, with 17 reviews, and every single one gave it a cracking five stars.

As my retro-review of Phantasy Star IV showed, a fantastic story can sear itself into the memory of the reader or player. Graphics, computing power and improving technology can help, but the beating heart of an RPG, whether tabletop, on the computer or in book form is the story.

Speaking of which, I managed to navigate my unorthodox and Byzantine folder system to find two documents: an old sample chapter and character creation plan for a gamebook. The test chapter was deliberately short (49 sections, which probably means 15-20 are needed to get from the start to the finish). I might see about lengthening it a little and maybe submitting it to the same fanzine that Sunil got published in. The character creation is much more complicated (I’d intended to write a full-on story and there are multiple races and classes), but I rather like it.

For those interested, there’s not only Mr. Prasannan’s challenging story available for free. Thanks to Project Aon, many of Joe Dever’s excellent Lone Wolf books are available for free, here: http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/FAQ

Please bear in mind that the work done by Project Aon cannot be redistributed and must be for personal use only (http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/License).

Thaddeus